54 thoughts on “What have we been doing for the past 25 years, anyway?”

1. Uhh…isn’t there an obvious choice?

2. Not if the answer is restricted to the last 25 years.

   I’ll nominate David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years and, just to rile everyone up, assert that there is nothing else. A fair amount of good, workmanlike stuff has been published. Nothing that brings anthropological insight and data to bear on big issues in a way that makes a great deal of difference to how we think about things.

3. I nominate Choctaw Genesis by Pat Galloway. It does a great job of demonstrating how useful anthropology is for historiography.

4. I read Predicament of Culture by Jim Clifford as a junior in college and it changed my life. Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wildman is another masterpiece.

5. The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community by Janet Carsten

   Before the general crisis of anthropological representation came the crisis of kinship. Carsten rebuilds a core anthropological concept and moves past the crisis into a productive research program.

6. Matt, what was it about Predicament of Culture that changed your life? I wonder how many here have had a similar experience with that particular book.

7. Can’t forget Dancing With the Devil by Jose Limon. There’s not a better role model for the kind of anthropology I want to do than that book.

   Predicament of Culture found me at 21 and that was the first time I really felt like “I get it!” That’s when I knew I wanted to be an anthropologist and it really stayed by my side for like, the first three years of grad school.

8. Matt, I hear you. I understand that the book was important for you. Why? What specifically was it about that book and not some other you were reading around the same time?

9. If the twentieth century as a whole is fair game, then I’d pick Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, and Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, for my top spots. There are quite a few others. The Savage Mind isn’t very good, in the final analysis (Chomsky really hit the nail on the head), but Elementary Structures is great.

   As for the last 25 years, I’m not sure. I think the production of knowledge is the point of the thing, not necessarily revolutionising our understanding of humankind. And when I compare the third and sixth editions of The Ancient Maya, I know somebody is doing something right. There are now more ethnographies of remote regions than before (like Gregory Forth’s detailed studies of societies in eastern Indonesia), and lots of lovely ethnohistorical works. See, for instance, Thomas Besom’s Of Summits and Sacrifice, an excellent ethnohistorical work on human sacrifice in the Inka empire, or another one in the same region, Gary Urton’s brilliant Signs of the Inka Khipu.

   There’s also been a lot of work attempting to unify broader primatology and the study of Homo sapiens sapiens, like Bernard Chapais’s Primeval Kinship. Fabulous stuff. It’s a really productive time in anthropology if you don’t expect your mind to be completely blown going in and if you can wade through the obscurantists’ and prescriptivists’ quagmire.

   In philosophy, the purpose is to write a text that coherently and beautifully resolves a conceptual problem, which means that each new text can be productive and revolutionary in some sense. That isn’t so true of an empirical discipline like anthropology. Expecting recent works in anthropology to change your view of people as a whole is like expecting biological theory to change your view of life today as much as it did back in 1859.

   On the other hand, there have been some good philosophical works that social scientists should read. Minsky’s The Society of Mind, Gilbert’s On Social Facts, Haack’s Evidence and Inquiry, Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, Sperber’s Explaining Culture, Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality. Lots of good ones. It’s a cumulative process, not one with stark epiphanies and clear arguments such as are found in philosophy, so the nature of the list has to be different.

10. Not a survey, but I recently counted all of the books cited in AE between 1974 and 2011.

    http://www.gjotsuki.net/Anthropology%20Citation%20Ranking.html#books

    These were the top 10 cited books:

    1. The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz.
    2. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Anderson.
    3. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu.
    4. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai.
    5. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Scott.
    6. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, Comaroff.
    7. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Turner.
    8. Europe and the People without History, Wolf.
    9. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Taussig.
    10. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Harvey.

11. Nice work, Grant. That’s a really interesting list. Thanks for sharing the URL!

12. Getting back to my conversation with John, there is a lot to like about Predicament of Culture. Cover to cover the essays are really strong.

    I have a lifelong fascination with Surrealism, and Clifford’s piece here is a favorite. The essay on Ethnographic Authority, I think, makes many of the same points as Writing Culture but its a much better read (similarly, Anthropology as Cultural Critique by Clifford and Marcus: better than WC).

    I think the great theme that runs through Clifford’s work is this relentless critique of essentialism. At times it can be quite exhausting/ exasperating as in On the Edges of Anthropology. But in Predicament, from Pure Products go Crazy to the Identity in Mashpee essay the treatment is still disconcerting but subtle and supple.

13. Grant Otsuki permalink
    Not a survey, but I recently counted all of the books cited in AE between 1974 and 2011.

    http://www.gjotsuki.net/Anthropology%20Citation%20Ranking.html#books

    These were the top 10 cited books:

    1. The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz (1973)
    2. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Anderson. (1983)
    3. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu. (1977)
    4. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai. (1996)
    5. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Scott. (1987)
    6. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, Comaroff. (1985)
    7. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Turner. (1967)
    8. Europe and the People without History, Wolf. (1982)
    9. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Taussig. (1980)
    10. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Harvey. (1992)

    What I have done here is to amend Grant’s list by adding initial publication dates. I observe that only Appadurai, Scott, and Harvey appeared after 1986, the year in which Writing Culture was published and that none are interpretive in the sense of the “interpretive turn” in which Writing Culture is said to have played so large a part. Without leaping to conclusions, let’s just say that there is a prima facie case here that the intellectual movement Writing Culture helped to launch has been a resounding dud. The intellectual introversion it made popular has led mainly to fragmentation, incoherence, and lack of public influence.

    It is interesting to note in this regard that the three most cited works published after 1986 are all a combination of political economy and history.

14. As it happens I was cleaning out my attic tonight and found a bunch of books. We might ask then: Are any of them any good? Well yes, there are several I could recommend to friends without fear of reprisal or would read again without plucking my own eyes out. I jotted down some notes as I packed them in boxes.

    Formations of Violence, Feldman (91)
    Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Marcus & Fischer (86)
    Playing Indian, Deloria (98)
    Body and Soul, Wacquant (04)
    Space on the Side of the Road, Steward (96)
    Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson (94)
    Performing Africa, Ebron (02)
    Latinos Inc, Davila (01)
    Nuclear Borderlands, Masco (06)
    Understories, Kosek (06)
    Farmworker’s Journey, Lopez (07)
    Diamond Queen, Tsing (93)
    Convict and the Colonel, Price (98)
    Mama Lola, Brown (97)
    Money has No Smell, Stoller (02)
    Barbarian Virtues, Jackobson (00)
    Blood Politics, Sturm (02)
    Devil’s Highway, Urrea (04)
    Dancing w/ the Devil, Limon (94)
    Harlemworld, Jackson (01)
    Turf Wars, Modan (07)

15. The question I am raising is not whether at least a few books produced in the last 25 years are any good. Many good, readable books have been produced. Some have been inspirational for at least some of us. What is missing, however, after the last quarter century is a list comparable to the one Grant produced—composed of books with which all of us who call ourselves anthropologists should be familiar. By coincidence the earliest book in Grant’s list is Turner (1967); the latest is Harvey 1992, another 25-year period that appears to have been extraordinarily productive of widely cited work.

    This conclusion must, of course, be qualified by the observation that Grant’s list is a list of the works most frequently cited in AE. A comparable list of work cited in Cultural Anthropology or Current Anthropology might be quite different. Ditto, of course, for works cited in more specialized journals or journals published outside the United States. That is why I noted that by adding publication dates to Grant’s list all that I produced was a prima facie case. I still see no evidence, however, that the tentative conclusions are wrong. At the end of the day, a miscellany of good books on various topics does not contradict the the proposition that fragmentation, incoherence, and lack of public influence have been characteristic of anthropology during the last quarter century since the publication of Writing Culture.

16. It’s a good hunch John, but how should we test it? Number of citations is just one method and it’s one that probably privileges older publications over younger ones since they would have more opportunities to be cited. If we drew up an ranking with one cite equal to one vote then top books might merely be the ones authors felt carried the most social capital, satisfied their reviewers and squelched their critics, or paid back debts to friends and mentors. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes when an author chooses a citation and utility is only one part of that (arguably not even the most important part).

    Note that Lackey (above) rejects measuring the great works according to “causal influence,” not the same thing as being cited but perhaps similar. Instead Lackey asks some experts which works have “intrinsic merit.” I’m not sure the intrinsic merit scale is all that great either, but if we did have a similar poll among anthropologists what criteria ought we use to replace it? Perhaps, “books with which all of us who call ourselves anthropologists should be familiar”?

17. Excellent points all, Matt. I bring up this topic because when I returned to academic pursuits around 1986, after a decade away preoccupied with family, a new career, that sort of thing, I found all sorts of people reading the earlier books on Grant’s list. When I started teaching again in 1994, the year long graduate seminar required of all graduate students- students in history, art, literature, sociology, international relations and business as well as anthropology—in the Program in Comparative Culture at Sophia University, where I had an adjunct gig, introduced me to Bourdieu and Harvey. (I was teaching but made a point of reading the graduate seminar books in an effort to integrate what I was doing with the rest of the program.)

    Every since the mid-90s, I have made a point of asking people what’s hot, what’s new, what should everybody be reading? The answers have been all over the place. Anthropological notables, the Comaroffs, Taussig, Marcus, Fischer, et al, seem to have reputations pretty much limited to their own students and friends. None is like Geertz, who used to write regularly for the New York Review of Books, Anderson, whose imaginary communities became a staple topic of debate among historians and political scientists, let alone Levi-Strauss who was, if only for a couple of decades, discussed and debated across a whole range of social scientific and humanistic disciplines. Cultural anthropology seems somehow smaller than it used to be, even though the number of anthropologists has grown. Is this just me?

18. Perhaps, “books with which all of us who call ourselves anthropologists should be familiar”?

    In that case, none of the works with which they actually are familiar should be included. Writing Culture is a terrible and useless book when put up against something like The Human Past (Chris Scarre (ed.), 2009). If you want to know about human populations (ie, if you’re an anthropologist, viz. a student of humankind) – why they are where they are, why they do what they do, how they evolved, and how they work – then it’s books like that that are important.

    Anthropological theory isn’t very good. I believe that is a sufficient explanation for its lack of impact in the wider world. Structural anthropology turned out to be much less productive than Chomskyan linguistics and cognitive science, and most anthropologists’ understanding of agency is trumped by the average philosophy post-grad. The only reason for avoiding cognitive science and evolutionary biology – the productive ways of approaching human beings – is tribalism on the part of anthropologists, who don’t seem to mind if their theoretical works solve no problems and make no sense as long as they come from anthropology departments.

19. @ Al Amen!!

20. “Anthropological theory isn’t very good. I believe that is a sufficient explanation for its lack of impact in the wider world.”

    Mr. West,

    I’d like to know what do you mean by “anthropological theory”? Everything written in the history of anthropology is not “very good”? Boas and Lévi-Strauss, Bateson and Ingold, Leenhardt and Strathern? Everything must be thrown in favor of “evolutionary biology” or “cognitive science”?

    Hah! “Tribalism” defined!

    As anthropologist working with a trans-disciplinary approach to environmental and natural resources conservation issues, I see biologists, ecologists, economists, sociologists and medical doctors using anthropological theory to increase the complexity of their models.

    Maybe I did not understand your point. But… if by “anthropological theory”, you mean all the post-modern theories that take every phenomena in the void of “power”… maybe you’re right.

    Sincerely,

    C.

21. See above; I have nothing against much theory in anthropology. Leach’s Political Systems and Levi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures would both make my list for books to include on any academic course about human beings (or at least, summaries of these works would). And I have nothing against most theoretical work in archaeology either, as you might be able to tell from my endorsement of The Human Past (on the cover of which is a quote from Sir Barry Cunliffe: ‘…absolutely essential reading for all students of archaeology’).

    I don’t believe everything should be thrown out in favour of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, either (clearly, these are incapable of explaining the diversity of human beings on their own). But everything that humans do is a product of their cognitive and affective faculties, which are some of the results of a 4,500,000,000 year process of evolution by natural selection. Their actions should be understood in a way that doesn’t conflict with this, and actively seeks to connect to it.

    This is not a controversial position: human beings are definitely the products of evolution, and they definitely have some predilections for certain behaviours as a result of their phylogenetic inheritance (these include things like walking, making inferences on the basis of a limited number of observations, throwing things, masturbating, and learning from other humans). The evidence for this is overwhelming, and the conceptual arguments are solid as well.

    Yet social/cultural anthropologists seem reluctant to accept these facts, for seemingly little reason, and this makes recent theorising insular, absurd, and without public interest – especially when you remember that most of the non-fiction-reading public accepts evolutionary theory implicitly.

22. Whoops – *3,700,000,000 years, not 4.5 billion.

23. Anyway:
    The Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern. Then if you want to say its anthropology, We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour. Further, Tim Ingold The Perception of the Environment. I am going to add Prey into Hunter by Maurice Bloch.

    If you include edited volumes, Daniel Miller Material Cultures and Janet Carsten Cultures of Relatedness.

    I guess I’m not talking Cultural Anthropology, am I? 😀 But yeah, David Graeber too (not just Debt).

24. It is interesting, isn’t it, that the only one on which doubt is cast whether it is, in fact, anthropology is by Latour, who is, excluding Graeber, the only author mentioned here whose work has stimulated scholarship and debate outside of anthropology.

25. Really?
    Take strathern . Go to scholar.google.com , search gender of the gift, click on te citations and peruse the list
    Repeat for others.

    But why would extradisplinary ‘impact’ be the performance measure in our (?) desire to audit anthroplogy.

26. Why would impact outside the discipline be important? That’s an easy one. Most anthropological research is taxpayer funded, and if the discipline starts looking like a refuge for people with esoteric hobbies that funding can be a problem. I was just reading on MathBlog that the oversupply of Ph.D.s is being felt in the STEM fields—it’s not a problem confined to social sciences and humanities. It seems a reasonable speculation that as academic budgets shrink, the axes will start to fall and fall first and fastest on fields that cannot demonstrate relevance and impact outside their own boundaries.

27. Interesting that you lament a supposed drop in academic value starting in the early to mid 80s and that precisely coincdes with the rise of that kund of neolberal reasoning.

    Let me add Audit Cultures to the list of those works that, if notexactly widely read, should be.

28. Latour has been a figure of fun more than anything. He’s an anti-realist; he claims to be a “super-realist”, but that’s only because he doesn’t know what anti-realism means. If you think he is worth following, then perhaps you should re-acquaint yourself with an old tale from Denmark.

    It is a depressing phenomenon, the popularity of this obvious charlatan. It seems that there will always be groups of gullible people who want to be on the supposed intellectual avant garde that they’ll leap on anything that looks like it, even if it smells of a bull’s arse.

    Also, isn’t commensurability one of the criteria you’re using to construct your list, maniaku? The only time I’ve ever seen Maurice Bloch give a talk in person, he spent almost the entire time railing against all of the other authors you mentioned, sometimes picking them out by name.

29. maniaku, I’m not saying that I like what is going on. As a taxpayer, I am happy to do my part funding higher education, even paying a little extra to fund research on exotic topics. After all, I took my turn at the public trough and got to study Daoist magic. Turn about is fair play. But as someone who reads fairly widely, Science as well as Cultural Anthropology and China Daily as well as The International Herald Tribune, I know that academia as a whole is confronting a global crisis, with too many graduates chasing too few jobs, in STEM fields as well as social sciences and humanities. Economies worldwide are fragile, and humanity as a whole is racing pell mell toward ecological catastrophe. There are also technological challenges like MOOC to think about. It isn’t knee-jerk neo-liberal thinking that makes me expect a major restructuring of academic privilege, in which introverted fields that lack strong external support are not likely to survive.

30. I was just reading on MathBlog that the oversupply of Ph.D.s is being felt in the STEM fields—it’s not a problem confined to social sciences and humanities.

    It does seem to be the case that mediocre scientists are in long supply.

    It seems a reasonable speculation that as academic budgets shrink, the axes will start to fall and fall first and fastest on fields that cannot demonstrate relevance and impact outside their own boundaries.

    The definition of ‘relevance’ is part of all of this, though. As a friend of mine once so beautifully put it (speaking of the R1 where both of us were studying at the time): a professor’s job is to do research, but what s/he is paid to do is teach. Impressionistically, R1s don’t optimize for this at all. And I am not talking about forcing professors to teach four courses a semester. I am talking about measuring teaching performance for tenure based on bubble sheet course evaluations when it is clear that the best predictor for a good course evaluation is students’ expected mark for the course. In this scenario anyone dim enough to ask a lot out of their students is probably too dim to deserve tenure. This is all the more pressing in an America in which college has become the place where young people learn what used to be taught in high school.

31. Some of the anthro books from the past 25 years that matter to me:

    Ferguson and Gupta: Anthropological Locations (1997)

    Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (2000)

    Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (2004)

    Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (1993)

    Shanks and Tilley: Social Theory in Archaeology (1988)

    Trigger: A History of Archaeological Throught (1988)

    Elyachar: Markets of Dispossession (2005)

    Graeber: Debt (2011) and Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001)

    Keith Hart: The Memory Bank (2000)

    William Roseberry: Anthropologies and Histories (1994)

    Trouillot: Global Transformations (2003)

    Eric Wolf: Envisioning Power (1999), Pathways of Power (2001)

    Gregory: The Devil Behind the Mirror (2007)

    Ed Bruner: Culture on Tour (2005)

    Arturo Escobar: Encountering Development (1995)

    James Ferguson: Anti-Politics Machine (1994)

    Valene Smith (ed): Hosts & Guests (1989)

    Setha Low: Behind the Gates (2003)

32. @Al:

    “Yet social/cultural anthropologists seem reluctant to accept these facts, for seemingly little reason, and this makes recent theorising insular, absurd, and without public interest…”

    Evolution matters. It’s not everything–but then neither is “culture” or “the social” of whatever people want to call it. I see no reason why anthropology has to take an either/or position when it comes to understanding human behavior.

    “The only reason for avoiding cognitive science and evolutionary biology – the productive ways of approaching human beings – is tribalism on the part of anthropologists…”

    I think some people in anthropology are rather rigid with what they accept as legitimate, whether they lean toward culture on the one hand or more biological explanations on the other. Why is it that you say that cog science and evolutionary bio approaches are THE productive ways of approaching human beings? No other perspectives matter?

    “Latour has been a figure of fun more than anything. He’s an anti-realist; he claims to be a “super-realist”, but that’s only because he doesn’t know what anti-realism means.”

    Hmm. So, which of Latour’s books have you read, and what are the specific problems you have with them? Are you against Latour in a de facto sort of way, or do you have specific disagreements? I read his “Reassembling the Social” (2005) and found it interesting–and pretty humorous in some parts. I am not one to join any church of thought, but I found his book useful and thought-provoking–and not because I was interested in one theoretical clique or another. I don’t care if he’s trendy, hip, too postmodern, or loved/hated in certain circles.

33. @MT Bradley:

    “I am talking about measuring teaching performance for tenure based on bubble sheet course evaluations when it is clear that the best predictor for a good course evaluation is students’ expected mark for the course.”

    Ya, gotta love bubble sheet metrics, as if they really tell us much about the value of the learning experience. I think your point about relevance and teaching versus research is an important one. Teaching is where anthropology is disseminated to a wide audience–and it should get more attention than it does (at R1s and elsewhere). I understand the fact that research brings in the bucks, and universities live on $$$, but hopefully at some point we will all start to rethink what the whole university system is all about. And since teaching requires a certain set of communicative skills, I wonder how a renewed emphasis on the value of teaching would change the BOOKS we label as “important” in the next 25 years.

    The point being that the value or impact of any book depends on the intended audience. If we write to ourselves and for ourselves we will get certain kinds of texts. If we write across disciplines, and to other audiences, well, who knows.

34. First, awesome idea. You should set up the SurveyMonkey survey. And a lively and fairly polite discussion by everyone up to this point!

    Second, I find it depressing that we think that Graeber’s Debt “speaks to the big issues,” but “workmanlike” ethnographies somehow don’t. (This is not to dismiss Graeber’s book, which is quite interesting.) The medium (or genre, in this case) is the message – culture is local and you need to pay attention to local contexts, even when looking at “big” issues like religion, neoliberal reform, or democratic governance.

    Finally, my major fear is that this sort of discussion devolves into the boring striving for status seen in posts like this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01160.x/full

    Only one person on that “playlist” had a decent answer about a class they like to teach. Compare Karen’ Ho’s answer, which begins with “One of my favorite courses to teach is on the social construction of whiteness” to Veena Das’s, which begins, “On the specific question of what it means to be attached to our utterances and thence the contours of the human voice.” Why is it hard for anthropologists to say “I teach about X. Here are some good books.” Instead we get “Derrida stands naked in front of his pussycat and ponders the species boundary.” I think (and hope) that readers of Savage Minds appreciate ethnography with data rather than talking around philosophy.

35. Why is it that you say that cog science and evolutionary bio approaches are THE productive ways of approaching human beings? No other perspectives matter?

    They’re the approaches because their foundations are certainly true. People are the products of evolution, and they work the way they do because of their nervous system being a particular way. Humans act because of events in their nervous systems, and all of their actions operate in this way. They get their nervous systems from chemical processes resulting from their genomes. This has to change any approach you take to social questions, as it means that there must be a way to reduce complex sociological phenomena, in principle, to events in individual human nervous systems. It also means that commonalities we find in humans may be partially explained through phylogenetic heritage. These facts have necessary implications for any theory of human society that might be proposed, but they are not often taken into account despite the fact that they are true.

    As for Latour:
    I read Reassembling the Social for a seminar a couple of years ago. I have also since read We Have Never Been Modern, and a couple of his articles. I picked up, but didn’t finish, The Prince and the Wolves, an absurd book.

    Social scientists don’t seem to understand this (or perhaps they ignore it), so I’ll make it explicit: Latour denies the existence of a world outside of human heads. He is usually careful to state this vaguely, as Sokal points out here, so that it could mean a much milder proposition. But it’s there, it’s the basis of his view. Of course, denying the world outside your head means that you can believe anything – you can have your cake and eat it too – so it doesn’t stop Latour from making claims about the world or even from contradicting his own solipsism.

    His sociological contributions are useless. What is actor-network-theory but a metaphor gone wild? If we ask why French fishermen fish for oysters (Callon’s example), it isn’t because of a network existing in the world in which both oysters and fishermen are nodes. That’s not even a useful way of looking at it, let alone a naturalistic or ontologically-valid one. It is instead because the fishermen have certain beliefs encoded in their nervous systems. They may believe (perhaps justifiably) that oysters are there; that oysters are valuable; that the effort involved in attempting to find and pick oysters is justified by the gain in money/edible shellfish; and so on. They have a whole stack of beliefs. It is the beliefs and desires of the fishermen that motivate and cause the oyster-collecting, not a set of non-human agents (whatever that could even mean).

    If Latour is saying that fishermen are motivated by beliefs, then that’s true but relatively trivial, and it wouldn’t warrant the attention his works command. He seems to suggest, however, that whatever someone believes to be real is indeed real – which is anti-realism (the denial of a single world outside of human heads). But he could also be suggesting, in RtS at least, that people are motivated by the things they consider to be real, but which may not actually be real (which is obviously true). In the first case he’s saying something ridiculous, solipsistic, and untrue. In the latter he’s saying something utterly trivial and entirely commonsense.

    Latour leaves it open enough that he manages to escape accusations of solipsism while proposing it at every turn. He’s a shrewd genius. A fantastic tailor, if you like your delicate silken suits to be invisible and intangible. And that is why I object to him and his works.

36. @Ryan – There are some keepers on that list! Thanks for sharing.

    @Bob – Glad you liked the survey idea. Tell me, which you think would be better: having five blank fields that people can fill in with their favorite titles; or having like a hundred nominations which people can just check off five (plus blank fields).

37. And yet, another proposition that social phenomenon should be reduced to some socio-biological common sense, because “genes are true”, “sociality is false”, everything is “encoded”, everything is given, and everything can be explained by some “snake oil” theory like the “selfish gene”. Reducing the complexity is a good way to make a mediocre science: Darwin’s theory on the Origin of Species is brilliant because it is complex.

38. Working definition of a realist: A man with a hammer for whom the whole world is made of nails.

    Scientific methods are great tools, and I agree with Al that we all ought to be familiar with as many as possible. But like all other tools, scientific tools have their limitations. To define reality as, a priori, all and only what your current tools can handle is a form of willful blindness. Scientism, not science.

39. OK, the last comment was a little snarky. Here, on the other side of the argument, is an extract from Nicholas Christakis’ Edge lecture: http://edge.org/conversation/a-21st-century-change-to-social-science

    We do, IMHO, need to think carefully about how anthropology fits in with these developments.

    —–
    This new frontier in the social sciences is being abetted and even accelerated by three things that are happening. The first is that a biological hurricane is approaching the social sciences. Discoveries in biology are calling into question all kinds of ideas, historically important ideas, in the social sciences—everything from the origin of free will, to collective expression and collective behavior, to the deep origins of basic human behaviors. All of these things are being challenged and elevated by discoveries in biology.

    For example, as we sequenced the human genome, we did it initially with an eye towards physiologic phenotypes (whether people express certain hormones, or what were the sources of certain variations in risk for diseases like diabetes, etc). Those discoveries are gradually going to be progressively applied to other realms having to do with human behavior.

    Incidentally, related to that, it’s not just that a biological hurricane is approaching the social sciences. Social sciences are generating questions that biologists are becoming interested in. One of my favorite examples of this is cooperation. This is a topic that social scientists have been interested in for a very long time, and evolutionary biologists as well. But now this is drilling down even to the cellular or molecular level, and people are beginning to ask questions about how sub-organismic biological entities “cooperate,” and what does it mean for biology?

    The second thing that is going to change, or challenge the social sciences, is the era of computational social science, or “big data.” If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of having, they would have said, “It would be unbelievable if we could have this little tiny Black Hawk helicopter that could be microscopic, fly on top of you, and monitor where you are and who you’re talking to, what you’re buying, what you’re thinking, and if it could do this in real time, all the time, for millions of people, all at the same time. If we could collect all these data, that would be amazing.”

    Of course, that’s exactly what we have now. We have, in everyone’s pocket, a little device that functionally does all of the foregoing. We can pool these data, and we can understand human behavior. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of human behavior is collective expression. Not just individual-level behavior, but how do humans aggregate to form collective entities, whether they are thought of as a super-organism, or thought of as communities or groups or networks or nation-states? How do human beings find a collective expression? And we can use all these data to begin to understand human behavior and collective human behavior in a completely new way.

    The third thing that’s happening that is going to radically reshape the social sciences—and it intersects with the foregoing two ideas, the biological hurricane and big data, or computational social science—is a newfound appreciation for experimentation in the social sciences. There was always a tradition of doing bona fide experiments in the social sciences, going back well over 100 years, where people would be randomly assigned to different treatments. Psychologists have always been doing this, of course, but other branches of the social sciences are increasingly rediscovering, and more broadly applying, experiments in all kinds of settings: workplaces, schools, hospitals, the developing world, online. People are doing experiments all the time right now, and these experiments offer a robustness of causal inference that is phenomenal.

    It intersects with the other two ideas that I mentioned in two ways. First of all, in some sense, the social sciences are aping the natural sciences in the deployment of experiments. The physicists and chemists always did experiments. Incidentally, not all physicists could do experiments. Astronomy, for example, doesn’t afford experiments. Geology doesn’t easily afford experiments. But nevertheless, there’s a sense in which the social sciences are rediscovering the power of experimentation, and in this way, too, reflecting this kind of convergence of the natural and the social sciences.

    This newfound appreciation and love of experimentation reflects the second point I made (regarding computational social science) because, with the advent of the Internet and distributed computing, the type of experiments you can do has increased dramatically, and their cost has fallen significantly. For example, in my lab, we create virtual laboratories online, where we recruit volunteers to participate in our experiments from around the world. Sometimes we pay them small amounts, for instance, by using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We can do experiments where we drop people into networks with different structures that we experimentally manipulate, and randomly assign them to live in different kinds of worlds, and then see how these people behave. For example, we can study what happens when they’re randomly assigned to a world in which the network has one mathematical structure, or, instead, randomly assigned to live in a world where the network has a different mathematical structure. That’s just one example of a kind of experiment that we’re doing in my lab, along with James Fowler. But there are many other types of experiments that people are doing, in face-to-face interactions and online.

    These three things: the biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation, are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a variety of discoveries and opportunities that offer tremendous prospect for improving the human condition.

40. Bora,

    Reductionism isn’t simplistic at all. Sociological phenomena consist entirely of human actions – billions upon billions of actions by billions of individuals. These actions result from nervous systems that are responsive to literally billions of different variables (Ramachandran has said that the number of potential human brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe, in fact). And these nervous systems come about due to genes forming them out of the available chemicals that come their way during pregnancy and after. What you have seen, heard, smelled, and touched, the nutrients you have imbibed, your prior thoughts, the nucleotide polymorphisms that occurred when your parents’ genetic material was being copied in the womb – all of these factors go into crafting your actions.

    This is not simplistic. It isn’t saying “genes determine your actions absolutely”, because that isn’t true. Genes allow for the nervous system to even exist, and it is from the nervous system that all actions, including those labelled “social”, ultimately come – but the human nervous system is susceptible to lots of other factors. Genes are only part of the explanation.

    The neo-Darwinian synthesis is reductionism in action. Reductionism is the view that things and actions are nothing more than the sum of their parts – in contrast to holism, which states that there are some things that have properties that don’t ultimately derive from their parts (ie, that there is something going on other than what is actually going on).

    Reductionism says nothing about the quantity of the parts, nor does it involve rejecting certain factors in explaining the universe (like the environment, or what we nebulously call “experience” or “nurture”; or ecological factors in evolutionary biology). It only seeks to understand how those variables operate in a naturalistic sense that doesn’t see the whole as something other or more than the sum of the parts.

    “Reductionist” is mostly used as a slur in anthropology, so it is understandable that you are mistaken about it.

    John McCreery,

    Working definition of a realist: A man with a hammer for whom the whole world is made of nails.

    We are dealing with a different meaning of “realism” here. It means only the belief that there is a world outside of your head – one reality, or one truth. That doesn’t mean the world is ultimately knowable, or that we have to endorse “scientism”. It means that the way the world is not dependant on or created by humans, and it means that direct contradictions cannot both be true.

    Latour is an anti-realist because he believes that what an individuals believes to be true is indeed true, meaning that if two individuals believe in contradictory things, they are both right. That means that there is no truth – there is nothing which is actually true about the universe. That is anti-realism.

    Michael Dummett espoused a view of realism/anti-realism that went something like this: anti-realism is the view that all truth is knowable by humans (possibly because they create it); realism is the view that there is a truth that is separable from our knowledge of it. I do not believe Dummett to be fundamentally mistaken here. As you can tell, this is not scientism.

    I should also point out that I don’t necessarily believe that all social scientists and historians need to be experts in, or even all that familiar with, genetics (although of course that would be nice). All I’m saying is that in constructing a theory of society, or social facts, as Bourdieu, Sperber, Searle, etc, have tried to do, you can’t ignore the fact that humans are the products of evolution who act through their nervous systems. If what you want to research is the nature of Moche agropastoralism in Early Horizon Peru, I don’t think you need to know all that much about genetics to do it well.

41. Also, that is an interesting article, John. Thank you for sharing.

42. @Al

    “People are the products of evolution, and they work the way they do because of their nervous system being a particular way.”

    Well yes, in part. But they are also the products of broad processes we label “history,” “culture,” and “society.” Evolution is the basis for potential/possibility, but it’s not the only determinant. Language comes from a biological capacity–but speaking a particular language comes from particular histories and cultural processes (learning, passing on information, attachment to certain ideals and ways of speaking, meaning attached to language, etc). People don’t speak a certain language because they have a gene or sets of genes that direct them toward Mandarin or Spanish.

    “This has to change any approach you take to social questions, as it means that there must be a way to reduce complex sociological phenomena, in principle, to events in individual human nervous systems.”

    I suppose this depends on whether you think this sort of reduction explains why people do things or how they have the potential to do certain things. I am fairly skeptical of the idea that all complex sociological behaviors or phenomena can be reduced or explained by individual biology. 50,000 people don’t sing a national anthem in a stadium simply because they share a set of genes, but because of certain biological capacities (cognition, speech, etc) that are shaped by silly little things like history, culture, habits, and so on.

    “It also means that commonalities we find in humans may be partially explained through phylogenetic heritage.”

    They key word being “partially.”

    “These facts have necessary implications for any theory of human society that might be proposed, but they are not often taken into account despite the fact that they are true.”

    Who is denying the import of human evolution? I understand that there are certain overzealous social/cultural types out there, but I don’t think there is some mass denial as you suggest. I do think there are some hardliners on both sides of the debate, though (the ‘selfish-gene’ types on the opposite end of the spectrum from the folks who explain all things through culture).

    “Social scientists don’t seem to understand this (or perhaps they ignore it), so I’ll make it explicit: Latour denies the existence of a world outside of human heads.”

    Does he? Where? Even if he does, I don’t really care. I read his 2005 book and found it interesting and thought provoking in some ways. I’m not looking to join the Church of Latour, so I am not all that worried about whether or not Bruno Latour believes that there is no reality outside of human heads, engages in solipsism, or happens to be a follower of Ayn Rand.

    “He seems to suggest, however, that whatever someone believes to be real is indeed real – which is anti-realism (the denial of a single world outside of human heads).”

    Ok, so you basically object to Latour on philosophical grounds because you see him as an anti-realist. Fair enough.

    “His sociological contributions are useless.”

    In your world I suppose they are. But not in mine. Ha. Now what?

43. I suppose this depends on whether you think this sort of reduction explains why people do things or how they have the potential to do certain things. I am fairly skeptical of the idea that all complex sociological behaviors or phenomena can be reduced or explained by individual biology. 50,000 people don’t sing a national anthem in a stadium simply because they share a set of genes

    Indeed they do not. But asking the question of why people do things is reducing their actions to reasons that they have – beliefs and desires encoded in their nervous systems/brains. People act on the basis of reasons. That is how they work. They have desires to do things, some of which come from their phylogenetic inheritance (the desire to avoid pain and death, for instance) and some of which come from their experiences, including experiences with other people.

    The most important part of the evo-bio/cog-sci view is the cog-sci, at least for empirical social scientists. And that means reducing social phenomena, like singing a national anthem, to the beliefs and desires of the people singing. Singing a national anthem depends on a lot of beliefs, especially beliefs about other peoples’ beliefs (ie, common knowledge). It isn’t something so complex that it is irreducible to its component parts, however. If you think it is irreducible, then you have a problem when people do different things. If singing a national anthem is an activity that occurs only at a “social” level of action that doesn’t reduce to the component humans and their beliefs, then you have a problem when someone doesn’t sing along.

    If on the other hand you see it as the conjunction of a large number of reasons for certain kinds of action, and an emergent property of human beliefs and desires encoded in brains, then someone not singing is to be expected if they have different beliefs and desires.

    Well yes, in part. But they are also the products of broad processes we label “history,” “culture,” and “society.” Evolution is the basis for potential/possibility, but it’s not the only determinant.

    What I said was that the way humans work in general terms is the result of an evolutionary process, not that what they do is determined by genetics. The way that humans work is determined mostly by their genes. What they do isn’t. The way the brain works is the result of natural selection; the content of the brain is determined by the person’s interactions with the world.

    And when we generalise about human societies and how they work, we are dealing with properties of human minds, the products of evolution. If you claim that social facts are irreducible, then you have to show a plausible root by which this could have resulted from natural selection, because that is how this supposedly universal feature of human life would have come into existence.

    Searle’s Making the Social World, amongst others, presents good arguments as to why this isn’t a possibility. Naturalistically speaking, methodological individualism is a necessity.

    Anyway, my problem with Latour is that he has produced very little in the way of good empirical work, and his reputation rests on his theoretical contributions. Those theoretical contributions are based on an insane, nonsensical background metaphysics, and the stuff that isn’t is entirely trivial. Following his work at all is a waste of time – not that you personally do so, Ryan, but others do.

44. A couple of corrections for mistakes in my posts:

    One, Michel Callon’s example is actually about scallops, not oysters, if I remember correctly.

    Two, Moche civilization actually developed in the Early Intermediate Period of Peruvian prehistory, not the Early Horizon.

    Three, *route, not “root”, by which social facts could develop naturalistically.

45. @Matt – I would say just have five blanks, if you can analyze data relatively easily in SurveyMonkey. It would be interesting to know if people who thought Saba Mahmood’s book is a great read are also reading Bruno Latour (or whatever two authors come to mind – I don’t know if anyone reading this thread has heard of Bruno Latour).

    Or, even better (or at least more complicated), have five blanks for books and five for articles.

46. Al,

    “What I said was that the way humans work in general terms is the result of an evolutionary process…”

    Well, that’s not a very controversial position. Who among the socio-cultural anthro crowd is denying this?

47. Well, that’s not a very controversial position. Who among the socio-cultural anthro crowd is denying this?

    You are correct; it’s not controversial. Of course there are people who deny it – who say that humans have no genetic input in their behaviours – and plenty of books have been written on that topic (cf. The Blank Slate). But my point is more that little attempt has been made to unify theory of society with the fact that humans are the products of evolution, and lots of ideas that are completely contrary to the possibilities allowed for by evolutionary theory are still around – including sociological non-reductionism. It’s a trivial point that humans are the products of evolution; it’s certainly true (as certain as the fact that I need water to live), and we’d all assent to it. But how many people factor it in to their reasoning about society?

    It has implications. If you propose that social facts are things independent of humans or things that don’t reduce to humans and their actions, beliefs, and desires, then that conflicts with naturalism and has no plausible root in the evolution of humans. And yet, this idea is still around.

    I’d also point out that cognitivism is about as well-founded as the theory of evolution and is a natural consequence of it on how we conceptualise humankind. But that isn’t exactly common, despite the fact that most of its basic principles would be assented to by almost everyone, as with evolution.

48. @Al

    You wrote: ““Reductionist” is mostly used as a slur in anthropology, so it is understandable that you are mistaken about it.”

    On the contrary, reductionism is a slur in anthropology because too much is known about the harmful consequences of using it as the basis for explaining the complexities of human behavior. See everything from Scientific Racism to the Culture of Poverty.

    The traits marked by genes (read evolution) in no way exhausts the possibilities of human development or behavior. Each cell in a multicellular organism (such as a human) has the same set of genes, yet cells are differentiated through an epigenetic (lit. above genetics) process of development – this is how complex organisms come about. There is no way to rewind the process of development – its effects are ramifying.

    In short, the whole IS greater than the sum of the base pairs. This holds true in the development of an organism, and through the organisms complex interactions with other organisms and its environment. This idea was written into anthropological orthodoxy by Kroeber in 1917. It also lies behind Zeno’s paradox. And was expressed by Lady Macbeth as, “what has been done cannot be undone.”

49. Al West, I don’t know how you could have read Reassembling the Social and then claim (with surprising self-assurance) that Latour holds a position that for most of the book he is explicitly critiquing. Either you didn’t read it or you didn’t understand it.

    Agreement among the authors was not a criteria for my list.

50. And when we generalise about human societies and how they work, we are dealing with properties of human minds, the products of evolution.

    Both true and insufficient. We are also dealing with the ways in which the bodies containing the minds are distributed in relation to each other and the material conditions that affect their distribution. This is, for example, why mathematical models of nuclear reactions also work pretty well as models of bar fights. The chances of an explosion rise when the individuals most likely to fight are concentrated in a large enough mass. Spread them out and scatter a few control rods (individuals inclined not to fight) among them and the likelihood of a fight declines dramatically.

    There is also the problem of how individual minds become equipped with the attitudes and dispositions that make, for example, a debate among East African porters over whose party gets the best camping sites on Kilimanjaro sound like a riot is imminent to climbers accustomed to conflict resolution in Japan (real case, been there, done that). That the relevant dispositions are “in” the minds of the individuals interacting at this particular point in time is not a direct consequence of genetic differences and, more importantly for social science, does not explain how they came to be there or which side will win the argument. That requires, at a minimum, knowledge of critical paths and an appreciation of other contingencies, e.g., the balance of forces (bigger versus smaller party) and rhetorical strategies and how well they are implemented.

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